More People Die After Smoking Drugs Than Injecting Them

NEW YORK — Smoking has surpassed injecting as the most common way of taking drugs in U.S. overdose deaths, a new government study suggests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called its study published Thursday the largest to look at how Americans took the drugs that killed them. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] CDC officials decided to study the topic after seeing reports from California suggesting that smoking fentanyl was becoming more common than injecting it. Potent, illicit versions of the painkiller are involved in more U.S. overdose deaths than any other drug. Some early research has suggested that smoking fentanyl is somewhat less deadly than injecting it, and any reduction in injection-related overdose deaths is a positive, said the study’s lead author, Lauren Tanz. But “both injection and smoking carry a substantial overdose risk,” and it’s not yet clear if a shift toward smoking fentanyl reduces U.S. overdose deaths, said Tanz, a CDC scientist who studies overdoses. Illicit fentanyl is an infamously powerful drug that, in powder form, increasingly has been cut into heroin or other drugs. In recent years, it’s been a primary driver of the U.S. overdose epidemic. Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. went up slightly in 2022 after two big leaps during the pandemic, and provisional data for the first nine months of 2023 suggests it inched up last year. For years, fentanyl has mainly been inject...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news